ners are a benefit should consider well the fate of the oil producer at the hands of the oil corner, which has become one of the established institutions of the country. The cornerer is a middle-man who leaves nothing for the end-men.

The most remarkable fact in the development of these Exchanges, that which completes the corner, is still to be pointed out. One of the managers of the New York Produce Exchange told a committee of the New York Legislature that, if the State should pass a law the Exchange did not like, and a member attempted to take advantage of it, they would expel him, and he added that men were constantly turned out for appealing to the law. Members are therefore practically compelled, contrary to their by-laws, whether they desire to do so or not, to submit their differences with their fellows to the summary tribunal of a committee of members, perhaps interested parties, and forego recourse to the law. When the proceedings by which the New York Stock Exchange expelled Mr. W. J. Hutchinson last year, whether justly or not is beside our purpose, were taken into court, the President of the Exchange refused, day after day for months, to answer any of the inquiries of the court as to the action of the Exchange. A member had been deprived of his seat, worth thirty thousand dollars, and his means of livelihood; but the Exchange insisted that neither in this nor in anything else was it subject to the jurisdiction of the courts. The New York Stock Exchange, which is the most powerful instrumentality in the world of finance, thus took its stand outside the law. The courts have decided that the seat of a member is property that can be seized by a creditor and sold for his benefit; but the creditors who seized Mr. Ketcham's seat have been trying for three years to sell it. Those who might buy are given to understand that the Exchange does not recognize the right of the courts to make any such decision, and will nullify it by refusing to accept the purchaser as a member, when he comes up for his election, which is ordinarily a matter of course. The courts of Illinois, hastening to do for the Board of Trade what the New York Stock Exchange is trying to do for itself, have decided that seats in the Board, which are every week bought and sold, are not property. The social consequences of this status of these Exchanges scarcely need be pointed out. These are the greatest markets in the world, but they are not open markets. No one can come in who comes in by way of the law. No one can remain who summons

an associate before the courts of justice, under the delusion that there is no spot under the Constitution where the laws of the land are not in order. The public must buy its securities of the Stock Exchange; the world must go to the Board of Trade to buy its food, and the American farmer must sell his crops there. But, for all that, they claim to be "voluntary associations," intrenched within lines picketed against the law.

The sovereignty to which the Produce Exchange and the Stock Exchange aspire has been conferred upon the Chicago Board of Trade by an unbroken line of decisions by the Supreme Court of Illinois. Year after year, those who have been cornered on the Board by its rich syndicates have appealed to the Supreme Court, sometimes for prevention of the wrong, sometimes to remedy it. The monotonous response of the judges has been that the Board was a voluntary association, and that it was not amenable to the courts. The latest decision, just handed down, is a complete abdication of all the rights of the State to exercise any judicial supervision over this corporation, though created by it. Its effects will be felt to the farthest point where a bushel of American wheat or a barrel of Chicago pork seeks a

consumer.

The victims of the wheat corner of last July appealed to the court for help on these grounds:

(1.) That, expecting to receive the wheat and intending to deliver it, they had bargained to supply it to certain persons, who had secretly formed a clique, and who, in order to make the performance of their contracts impossible, as well as to extort an outrageous price from the public, had bought up all the wheat in the market, and ten million bushels more.

(2.) That the clique had done this, criminally and fraudulently, and then demanded ruinous damages of them, under the guise of fictitious prices.

(3.) That they had been compelled by the Board against their will to submit the settlement of this claim to a special tribunal of the Board, outside the arbitration committee.

(4.) That this tribunal was instituted in violation of the constitution of the State, the charter of the Board, and under an illegal by-law.

(5.) That it had not been made up even as required by this

by-law, and that its procedure had not followed the rules of the Board.

(6.) That it had excluded necessary evidence, had admitted improper evidence, and had been guilty of gross misconduct and fraud.

(7.) That it had made an unjust decision contrary to the rules of the Board and the laws of the land, awarding heavy damages to those who, by conspiracy, had made it impossible for them to fulfill their contracts.

(8.) That from this decision there was no appeal.

(9.) That unless the court would immediately interfere to prevent the Board from acting on this decision, they must either pay these cruel and fictitious damages or be expelled without charges, trial, or notice; be deprived of their membership in the only Exchange where they could carry on their business, worth at least $15,000 a year to them; that their seats, worth $3,800 each, would be taken from them, and with these their share in the capital of the Board-$200,000-and its surplus of $275,000; and that the consequences of this, to them, their families, their reputation, and their business, would be irreparable, and not to be made good by any money compensation.

To all these statements the Board, in serene reliance on the previous decisions of the court, made answer, in three lines, that all these things might be so, but that it was none of the court's business; and the court said the Board was right, and denied the petition. By this decision the court declared itself the ally of the makers of unnatural prices for food. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid, the next morning, to the clique as a penalty for not delivering to it wheat which was already in its possession. Nothing remains for this court but to decide that it could not interfere if the Board decreed that the bodies as well as the fortunes of the cornered should be divided up among the

cornerers.

It seems incredible that this should be law in any civilized community, but it is law in the whole food world. This is more than Illinois law. There are years when one man in every three in England, and one man in every twenty in France, must live on American wheat, and every one of them is deprived, by this decision, of the protection of the law in buying his food. Buyers have no rights if sellers have none. Dante saw written over the VOL. CXXXVII.-NO. 321.

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door of hell: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." On the threshold of the Board of Trade, the Produce Exchange, and the Stock Exchange, is inscribed: "Your rights resign within these walls."

This ends an era. Not even the Witch of Endor could have made Adam Smith believe, when he was laboring to prove that men did not deserve to be pilloried for buying and selling wheat, that within a century trading in food would be carried on with this absolute license, in markets of this power and finish. The jail, which was the habitat of the distrusted grain trader of his day, has become this palace of exchange,- capable of handling the world's surplus in an afternoon; fixing the price of real wheat by that of fiat wheat; connected by telegraph with the stomachs and bank accounts of Christendom; bringing all the owners of the crop into one place, and then overcoming them by a combination of capital, banks, and the courts; created to apportion the food of nations, and perverted to make artificial famines; a field for free contract, where the most profitable business is conspiracy to make the performance of contracts impossible; a creation of the State but declared officially to be above the law. "Progress" can go no farther than this. It is of no use for generous souls in search of a Cause to take the stump for freedom of contract here. They are a century too late. The fatality of their environment is against them. Freedom has o'erleaped herself.

If courts of summary jurisdiction, picturesquely called Courts of the Dusty Feet, were a necessity of the medieval fair, which was the chrysalis of the modern Exchange, they are a thousand times more necessary now when business is done by electricity. No Exchange could survive the delays of the ordinary courts. But these summary tribunals must be courts of justice, not of injustice. They are to exist only as quicker ways of affording the same remedy for wrong as would be afforded, but with less celerity, by the courts. They must not be handed over to the cliques for purposes of spoliation. The rights of the farmers, the traders, the consumers, are of too vast importance to be abandoned to tribunals above the law, and composed of the members of the guilds that allow such uses as we have described to be made of them. The members who are the "judges" of these tribunals are men preoccupied with their own business. They are ignorant of the law and the rules of evidence. They

are constantly trading in the market, and are almost certain to be interested in one way or another. They may sometimes be the brokers of the very cliques who appeal to them to secure the results of their own conspiracy. They are certainly swayed by the false notions of business honor and morality which prevail in these Exchanges. Contracts are sacred, but the obligation is mutual. When you bind me to deliver you wheat or pork, it is you who break the contract if you prevent me from getting it.

"But these are gamblers." Too many of them are. But their dice are loaves of bread. The chances they take are the chances of human life. Real prices all over the world rise and fall with their gambling prices. That they may play their game of forfeits inside the Board, thousands who cannot get enough to eat must act tragedy outside. Civilization forms an acquiescent ring around these thugs of the Board and Produce Exchange, when it knows that every movement of their struggle within intensifies the universal struggle for existence without. It is unendurable that the courts of the Board and the courts of the State should permit one set of gamblers-even to punish another set of gamblers-to force the prices of bread and meat to starvation figures.

By the use the Exchanges have made of this privilege of having courts of their own-which, in the case of the food markets, under pretense of settling differences among the members, literally permit them to rob the world of its daily bread — they have invited the indignant interference of the public. Summary tribunals the Stock Exchange, the Board of Trade, the Produce Exchange must have, but they must not be such tribunals as these. The trunk line railroads have put railroad civilization ahead a generation by abandoning private war and referring their quarrels to the arbitration of such a man as Charles Francis Adams, Jr., an outsider, expert and just. Something like this must be done to civilize the combats on the Board of Trade. All the markets are being paralyzed by manipulation. They can be saved only by the establishment of tribunals, of competent and disinterested men, to settle the disputes that arise in the course of business and cannot wait for the courts. These official arbitrators could be assisted, if need be, by arbitrators chosen by the disputants. They should be empowered not only to receive evidence as our judges do, but, unlike them, to send out for any